 According to a new book, Philip Zelikow advocated for his friend Condeleezza Rice as head of the 9/11 Commission. |
On Tuesday, Sept. 4, 2001, White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke sent out an e-mail warning of a great tragedy where “hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.,” adding that “that future day could happen at any time.” Less than two years later, Warren Bass, an investigator for the 9/11 Commission, stumbled across this e-mail and many exchanges like it sent to Condoleezza Rice that seemed to confirm that the Bush White House had ignored repeated warnings about Osama bin Laden’s threat. When Bass tried to take these messages to the panel, though, he ran into a roadblock, reports Newsweek in a review of a new book The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon. According to Shenon that roadblock was Philip Zelikow, a UVA historian and Miller Center fellow hired to be the 9/11 Commission’s executive director. He was also a longtime friend of Rice’s (the two had worked for the first President Bush and had coauthored a book). In commission staff meetings, Zelikow repeatedly went to bat for Rice and the White House, and according to Shenon, Bass was so disturbed by what he saw as Zelikow’s bullying that at one point he threatened to resign. Despite this, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff finds there to be many damning figures with CIA director George Tenet coming off worse. “There was more than enough blame to go around,” he writes.